Release Notes for v44.0.0

Stack Upgrades

• Chromium 152.0.7977.54
  • Chrome 152 beta
  • New in 151
• Node v24.18.1
  • Node 24.18.0 blog post
• V8 15.2

Breaking Changes

• Removed support for the Unity desktop environment on Linux. #51649
• Added select-client-certificate event support for net.request and net.fetch; requests to servers requesting a client certificate no longer fail with ERR_SSL_CLIENT_AUTH_CERT_NEEDED, and applications can now select a certificate to present. #52397
• macOS 12 (Monterey) is no longer supported by Chromium. Older versions of Electron will continue to run on Monterey, but macOS 13 (Ventura) or later will be required to run Electron v44.0.0 and higher. #51967
• ANGLE is now statically linked into the Electron binary on all platforms, matching upstream Chromium. The libEGL.(so|dylib|dll) and libGLESv2.(so|dylib|dll) libraries are no longer shipped in the distribution. #52288
• net.request now rejects requests where Sec-Fetch-Dest is document, frame, iframe, or fencedframe unless Sec-Fetch-Mode is also set to navigate. #52216
• Removed 32-bit builds (Windows ia32 and Linux armv7l). Electron is now published only for 64-bit (x64 and arm64) platforms. #52326
• The clipboard module is now aligned with the W3C Clipboard API and is no longer exposed to renderer processes. #52508
• Removed the openAsHidden option from app.setLoginItemSettings() and the openAsHidden, wasOpenedAsHidden and restoreState fields from the return value of app.getLoginItemSettings(). These only worked on macOS 12 and below, which are no longer supported. #52667

See the Breaking Changes doc for more details about these changes.

Features

• Added Notification.remove(), removeAll(), and removeGroup() static methods for macOS. #51182 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Added available to process.getSystemMemoryInfo() on Linux, exposing proc/meminfo MemAvailable. #52380 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Added net.WebSocket, a WHATWG-compatible WebSocket client for the main process that routes through Chromium's network stack. #51593 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Added webContents.setZoomMode(mode), webContents.getZoomMode(), and webContents.zoomMode for per-WebContents zoom control. #49962
• Added webFrameMain.printToPDF() to allow printing individual frames to PDF from the main process. #52625 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Added a Save/Restore Window State API for cross-platform use. #52270
• Added a badge property to MenuItem on macOS 14+ for showing a count or custom text badge next to a menu item's label. #53046
• Added support for win.setOpacity(opacity) on Linux. #51455
• Added webContents.caretBrowsingEnabled for toggling caret browsing in a WebContents. #53035
• Frameless windows on Linux now use system-themed titlebar icons for Window Controls Overlay (WCO). #52531
• Frameless windows on Linux now have rounded corners by default, just like on macOS and Windows. Rounded corners can be disabled on all platforms by setting roundedCorners: false on the window. #51459 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Restored app.setBadgeCount and win.setProgressBar for Linux. These APIs now support any dock or taskbar which implements the LauncherEntry D-Bus API, and they no longer require libunity. #52895

Fixes

• If a nativeImage was passed an image with a color profile, its pixel values will now be normalized to SRGB. This ensures that two visually identical images after color space application will receive similar pixel values when converted to a nativeImage. #48178 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Fixed DevTools Network panel missing most requests after navigating when webContents.debugger is attached. #51959 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed DevTools device metrics overrides persisting indefinitely when a remote debugging client disconnected without clearing them. #52930 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed DevTools popup and context menus not appearing when DevTools is hosted in a custom window via webContents.setDevToolsWebContents(). #52434 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed Window Controls Overlay caption buttons not rendering on Linux. #52580
• Fixed Windows edge case in NativeWindowViews::MoveBehindTaskBarIfNeeded(). #52000 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed BrowserWindow.unmaximize() and restore() having no effect on Wayland when the window was maximized immediately after creation. #53124 ^{(Also in 42)}
• Fixed BrowserWindow size corruption on Windows when created with explicit x/y on a secondary monitor whose DPI differs from the primary. #52499 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed Dirent.parentPath being undefined for fs.readdir, fs.readdirSync, fs.glob, and fs.globSync with withFileTypes: true inside asar archives. #52507 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed ProtocolResponse.url requests being made through the default session instead of the session the protocol handler was registered on when ProtocolResponse.session was not set. #52113 ^{(Also in 40, 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed Uncaught illegal access errors and possible renderer crashes after closing a same-process child window or removing an iframe with nodeIntegrationInSubFrames enabled. #53040 ^{(Also in 42)}
• Fixed app.disableHardwareAcceleration() not fully disabling GPU hardware usage on Windows starting from Electron 38. #52370 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed dialog.showOpenDialog and dialog.showSaveDialog opening at an unusable location on Linux when defaultPath is a bare filename without a directory. #52402 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed registerFileProtocol and registerHttpProtocol returning readable responses to cross-origin no-cors fetches; they now return opaque responses like protocol.handle. #52852 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed select-hid-device presenting HID devices that could not be granted, which caused navigator.hid.requestDevice() to resolve with no device. #52497
• Fixed a use-after-free crash with protocol.registerStreamProtocol when an error is emitted during a read. #52515 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a WebContentsView staying blank after its window is shown when setBackgroundThrottling(false) was called while the window was hidden. #52863 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a browser process crash that could occur during Windows logoff, shutdown, or restart. #52619 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a browser process crash when calling webContents.reload() or navigating synchronously from the render-process-gone event; the event is now emitted after the renderer's teardown notification has completed. #51900 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a browser-process crash (ValidateIntegrityOrDie) and spurious preload ENOENT errors when an app's app.asar is replaced on disk (e.g., by an updater or MDM software) while the app is running. #52292 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a bug on Linux where a 1px line appeared at the top of a frameless window if the window and web contents had different background colors. #51458 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash in systemPreferences.promptTouchID(reason) when an invalid reason value is passed. #52781 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash in the macOS Touch ID WebAuthn prompt caused by a missing string resource, and added touchID.promptReason to app.configureWebAuthn() to customize the prompt text. #51592 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash on Linux when the D-Bus session bus disconnected while the app was running, such as at logout or when dbus is restarted. #53096 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash on MacOS when a user clicked into a title bar or top view. #51586 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash report when the X server or Wayland compositor exits while an app is running. #52684 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash that could occur when closing DevTools while the host WebContents was being destroyed. #52509 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash when accessing frame details during cross-origin navigation. #53109
• Fixed a crash when quickly switching menus while the app is under heavy load. #52672 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash when resolving a path inside a malformed ASAR archive that contains cyclic link entries. #52858 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash when showing Linux message boxes while another Linux UI implementation was active. #52409 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash with app.setLoginItemSettings if a non-UTF8 service name is used. #52801 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a graphical glitch on Linux where thin borders appeared past the drop shadows on frameless windows when multiple windows were created. #52606 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a memory leak when creating BrowserWindows. #52894 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a possible crash (SIGABRT) during process exit when the process had loaded tls/https shortly before exiting, affecting app.exit() before ready and short-lived ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE / child_process.fork() scripts. #52871 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a possible main process crash at quit when a session was created from JavaScript running during shutdown. #52924 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a potential crash in contentTracing.stopRecording() when the trace file could not be written to the requested path. #52794 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a potential crash when notifying user activation before the primary main frame was live. #52698 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a rare crash in the main process when DevTools were opened and a garbage collection ran before the DevTools frontend finished loading. #52904 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a regression preventing transparent frameless windows from being resized on Linux. #52891 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Fixed a renderer crash when a page calls SpeechRecognition.available() or SpeechRecognition.install() with processLocally. #53021 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a renderer crash when calling WebAssembly.compileStreaming() or WebAssembly.instantiateStreaming() with nodeIntegration enabled. #51953 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a window being marked hidden and background-throttled on macOS when covered by a transparent or click-through window. #52391 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed an npm install failure with no recovery path when the OS blocked the native zip extractor from loading (for example, Windows Smart App Control). #52846 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Fixed an issue on Linux and Windows where frameless windows would shrink when calling win.center(). Additionally, fixed an issue where frameless windows would appear slightly off-center on Windows. #51732 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue on Linux where the system theme color appeared at the top edge of frameless windows. #52062 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue on Windows where the app process could fail to exit after app.quit() while a shell.openExternal() or shell.openPath() call was still waiting on a system "Open with" dialog. #52898 ^{(Also in 41, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where process and other Node globals were undefined in ESM preload scripts when contextIsolation was disabled. #51693 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where a JavaScript out-of-memory crash could be reported from inside the crash-key handler instead of at the out-of-memory site. #52724 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where clicking the maximize button could progressively shrink the window in some Wayland environments. #52012 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where frameless windows windows could shrink after applying constraints or toggling resizability on Windows. #51562 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where loading ICO files from ASAR archives on Windows left temporary icon files behind. #52477 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where some values passed into requestSingleInstanceLock could result in a crash. #52470 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where the "Toggle Developer Tools" menu item failed to function correctly with BaseWindow. #49356 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash when calling close() on a notification within a close event on macOS. #51597 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash in the sharedTexture module when GPU context becomes unavailable. #52926 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed a crash triggered by replacing an open application menu. #52277 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed custom V8 snapshots (electron-mksnapshot, and the loadBrowserProcessSpecificV8Snapshot fuse) having no effect in the main process on macOS arm64, Linux x64 and Windows x64. #52878 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed desktopCapturer thumbnail generation and premature portal timeout on Linux with Wayland. #51674 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Fixed downloading files that live inside an ASAR archive, including saving a packed PDF from the built-in PDF viewer. #52827 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed native addon compilation failure with undefined MSVC intrinsic from v8 headers. #51695 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed running under tsx import transpilation. #51947 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed sandboxed preload scripts running a stale cached version after the script was modified without its file size changing. #51930 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed spellcheck not initializing on Linux when the dictionary was already cached from a previous run. #52716
• Fixed the Linux system accent color intermittently not being applied (systemPreferences.getAccentColor() returning an empty string on some launches). #52574
• Fixed the built-in PDF viewer not rendering documents in in-memory sessions (partitions without the persist: prefix). #52834 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed the context menu in a detached DevTools window focusing the inspected page's window instead of the DevTools window. #51805 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed the primary instance being killed or receiving truncated arguments when a second instance passed a very long command line or large additionalData to app.requestSingleInstanceLock(). #52950
• Fixed titleBarOverlay.color set to rgba(0,0,0,0) failing back to default frame color. #51017 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed unnecessary autofill popup creation for fields without datalist suggestions, which could cause input latency on macOS. #52318 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed utility process crashes at exit on Windows 11 24H2 and later. #53093 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Fixed windows opened by a sandboxed top-level frame not inheriting the opener's sandbox restrictions. #52851 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed webContents.print() returning "Invalid printer settings" when print options are provided. #52382 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Fixeed document title updates when using back/forward navigation using the same document without utilizing browserWindow.setTitle(). #52968 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Improved external resize band positioning and scaling for frameless windows on Windows. #51503 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Made "reload" menu items work with BaseWindow. #51985 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Windows opened from links inside a sandboxed iframe now inherit the iframe's sandbox restrictions unless allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox is set. #52133 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed an issue where getDisplayMedia({ audio: { restrictOwnAudio: true } }) was ignored in setDisplayMediaRequestHandler, causing loopback audio to include local app playback. #52534 ^{(Also in 43)}
• <webview> and window.open now inherit nodeIntegrationInWorker from the embedder, consistent with the other Node and sandbox preferences. #52832 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Fixed potential deadlock inside app.getLoginItemSettings() on macOS. #52667
• Fixed Tray icons not appearing (and their menus not opening) on Linux desktops that address the StatusNotifierItem by its unique D-Bus name or via the org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem interface, such as GNOME with the AppIndicator extension, Cinnamon and XFCE. #52951
• Fixed a 1-in-200 chance per renderer process on Windows of scripts on the first page load being compiled without their V8 code cache. #52792 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• On Linux, fixed runtime toggling of shadows for frameless windows and added support for system-configured button layouts in Window Controls Overlay on Linux. #51161 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Fixed silent data truncation in Buffer/TextEncoder APIs and a crash in fs.writeFileSync with non-ASCII strings on Apple Silicon. #51848 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Improved the error message when an asar integrity check fails to name the entry that failed. #52624 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}

Performance Improvements

• Enabled ThinLTO on macOS builds. #51669 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Made various performance improvements related to initialization and IPC. #53017 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Improved app startup time by booting the main process from an embedded Node.js startup snapshot. #51703 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Improved application startup time on Linux by skipping GDK's OpenGL probe and loading FontConfig off the main thread during toolkit initialization. #53107 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Improved performance of Linux and Windows release builds by enabling ThinLTO link-time optimization for the main Electron binary. #51809 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Improved performance of webRequest header conversions and several other gin converter hot paths. #51599 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Improved performance of native event emission, IPC dispatch, and option-dictionary parsing. #51596 ^{(Also in 41, 42, 43)}
• Improved runtime performance by consuming Electron-generated PGO profiles instead of Chrome's published ones. #51815 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Improved sandboxed renderer startup performance — preload scripts and process info are now pushed ahead of navigation instead of fetched via blocking IPC, and preload compilation results are cached on disk. Preload stack traces now show the correct file path and line number. #51602 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Improved startup time of utilityProcess.fork(), child_process.fork() / ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE child processes and Node.js-enabled renderers. #53134 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Linux arm64, Windows arm64 and macOS x64 builds now start the main process from the embedded Node.js startup snapshot like the other platforms, improving startup time. #52879 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Reduced idle main-process CPU wakeups caused by Node.js timers and immediates. #52906 ^{(Also in 43)}
• Reduced sandboxed renderer cold-start time (DidClearWindowObject) by ~35% by deserializing a build-time V8 code cache for Electron's framework bundles instead of parsing and compiling them from source on every launch. #51697 ^{(Also in 42, 43)}
• Reduced the Linux distribution size by ~37 MB by only shipping locale strings and resources that Electron can actually use. #51804
• Removed showHiddenFiles support from the dialog API on Linux. #51704 ^{(Also in 43)}
• The first sandboxed BrowserWindow now starts in a renderer process launched ahead of time when the default session already exists, shortening the time from window creation to the page's first script; apps that open many windows can keep a spare renderer warm at all times with --enable-features=SpareRendererForSitePerProcess. #53144
• The non-functional dummy libEGL.so and libGLESv2.so files are no longer included in the Linux distribution, now that ANGLE is statically linked. #52227

Other Changes

• Updated the Squirrel.Mac autoUpdater backend on macOS to pick up upstream fixes, including correct version-string validation when downgrade prevention is enabled, fixes for stale launcher errors persisting across update checks, and forwarding of custom download request headers. #51584
• Backported fixes from upstream Chromium and V8. #52774
• Backported fixes from upstream Chromium. #52701

Documentation

• Documentation changes: #50560, #51426, #51559, #52538, #52539